“What we often forget in the daily drumbeat of abuses by the dominant tech companies is our complicity in these abuses, and in the fundamental and unsettling ways the internet has changed every one of us.”

As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enters its seventieth anniversary, Dave Eggers, in the 2018 PEN H. G. Wells lecture, argues that urgent amendments are needed to mitigate the corrosive effects of technology on the societal and the personal. You can read an edited extract from the lecture on the TLS website.

This is a recording of an event that took place on December 16, 2018, at the Bridge Theatre, London.  

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Phil Baker guides us through the morbid, wistful and yet immensely charming world of the writer and illustrator Edward Gorey; Frances Wilson weighs the pleasures and pains of letter and email writing; Ian Sansom on the struggle to be funny

Books

Born To Be Posthumous: The eccentric life and mysterious genius of Edward Gorey, by Mark Dery

What a Hazard a Letter Is: The strange destiny of the unsent letter, by Caroline Atkins

Written In History: Letters that changed the world, by Simon Sebag Montefiore

In Their Own Words: Volume 2: More letters from history

Wit's End: What wit is, how it works, and why we need it, by James Geary

Messing About In Quotes: A little Oxford dictionary of humorous quotations, compiled by Gyles Brandreth

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